A Memory Comparison of Light Linux Desktops | Hacker News Reader

A Memory Comparison of Light Linux Desktops

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79 pointsTsiolkovsky39 comments

in case anyone is interested in a functional comparison of rather niche DEs, check this thread on #! forums http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=18273 "30 Window Managers in 30 days"

Stacking Window managers

   Day 1.5 -- Housekeeping
   Day 2 -- jwm
   Day 3 -- flwm
   Day 4 -- fluxbox
   Day 5 -- pekwm
   Day 6 -- twm
   Day 7 -- evilwm
   Day 8 -- windowlab
   Day 9 -- lwm and wm2
   Day 10 -- aewm

Tiling Window Managers

   Day 11 -- scrotwm
   Day 12 -- wmii
   Day 13 -- i3
   Day 14 -- wmfs
   Day 15 -- dwm
   Day 16 -- catwm and dminiwm
   Day 17 -- snapwm and monsterwm
   Day 18 -- musca
   Day 19 -- tmux
   Day 20 -- ratpoison

Random Other Window Managers

   Day 21 -- sithwm
   Day 22 -- euclid-wm
   Day 23 -- oroborus
   Day 24 -- icewm
   Day 25 -- herbstluftwm
   Day 26 -- dvtm
   Day 27 -- sapphire and cwm
   Day 28 -- echinus and larswm
   Day 29 -- xmonad and awesome
   Day 30 -- tinywm

The author completely missed the point about sithwm, which has actually no virtual desktops but one big desktop and your screen is the viewport on it.

wow, after your comment I just checked out its page and it's an amazing blast from the past http://sithwm.darkside.no/ :) http://sithwm.darkside.no/menu.png is it even that eyes follow cursor thingie? :)

When I dabbled in writing a tiling WM in python, xeyes was my go-to testing app. It doesn't grab focus ever, which is nice when you haven't yet coded up focus grabbing (or keybindings, even).

I would test my tiling algorithms by filling up the screen with hundreds of eyeballs in a Xephyr instance. My roommate seriously started worrying about my mental health :)

  xeyes = eyes follow the cursor thingie

Hooray for i3! Best one I've found for managing a ton of windows that all need a lot of space.

I've been dipping a foot into i3, and so far, so good.

As for LDXE, I wish it came with better multi-monitor support, out of the box. Were that the case, I'd start pointing people with older machines at it.

Unity and GNOME 3 would be great for comparison - I've seen over 1GB in use by Unity at times.

It'd also be nice to try to measure CPU overhead when dragging a window around or just displaying them. Some of the newer desktops just seem slow if you have older hardware (such as a laptop with a C2D, Intel or older ATI graphics)

Is anyone else experiencing sentimental vertigo over seeing Enlightenment mentioned in a list of lightweight environments... and actually doing quite well? Back in 1999 things sure were different.

Enlightenment did a good job looking a great deal heavier than it actually was. Back in ~1998 or so I purchased a cheap Pentium 133Mhz laptop with 48MB of RAM (poor student), and ended up settling on Enlightement as the window manager of choice. This was a fairly brutally underspec'ed machine for the time, but Enlightment was doing a fairly good job. I had to use a relatively unflashy theme, but that was no big deal.

(I did get a bit of win running Gentoo on it... yes, I'm not kidding, about either getting a win or running Gentoo. At the time, binary distros were just beginning to consider shipping things other than 486 binaries, and gcc had enough pentium optimizations that using Gentoo could get you noticeably faster binaries, even with very conservative optimization settings. And neither disk space, bandwidth, nor CPU power was so cheap that distros routinely compiled binaries for half-a-dozen architectures like they can now. Enlightement benefited a lot from Pentium optimizations. Nowadays the Gentoo performance win is virtually gone, because $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO probably already has something much closer to your target architecture already available.)

I presume you wanted to write "133Mhz"?

Ha, yes. How times change, when even my cell phone is measured in GHz.

Fluxbox reminded me of the Openlook Window Manager (olwm) and that would have been from 1992 or so. :-)

I created a pretty fancy fvwm configuration a couple years ago that matched my xmonad configuration fairly closely (except for the obvious). Never did care for the OpenLook style as much as the Motif style, though neither are fantastic.

I know it's a bit old, but if you're into this kind of things give WindowMaker a try. I have a 12 years laptop and it's the only window manager that runs on it. (and it's quite a good experience IMHO)

I love WindowMaker; it has to be one of the best window managers for productivity. The workflow is just so natural, and it's so easy to use.

Linux would have been on par with OSX if all those ressources wasted on Gnome had been focused on GNUstep.

Work is actually being done about it. See the Etoile project: http://etoileos.com/

But I agree, GNUstep is so much better than GNOME/GTK, both as a development environment and as a working environment. I wish there were more developers working on the project; development is so slow.

This isn't like Hurd (an unnecessary piece of software that really is pointless); GNUstep really is a genius piece of software.

I came on here to complain that wmaker isn't on this list. IMO it's the best WM for X.

As for the rest of GNUstep, at various points during the 2000s decade I'd been interested in GNUstep, developed a little bit with it, used to use apps like GNUMail, etc. And it's definitely a cool project. But I have to say it's by no means a lightweight toolkit. It seemed pretty sluggish for the entirety of the time I used it. Maybe it's fast now that hardware is ridiculous. But I think if WindowMaker actually used GNUstep's AppKit (it does not), it would be a lot more sluggish than it is, and that would make it pretty bad. I've used wmaker since the 90s and it's never felt like a bottleneck. Can't say the same about the rest of GNUstep.

I know I'm being nitpicky, but OpenBox is a clone of BlackBox, not a fork. OpenBox is written in straight C, while BlackBox and FluxBox use C++.

And what about Fvwm? My setup does not really match modern UI concept (no taskbar, iconify to desktop icon, floating panel with pager and clock) and the whole thing with tpb and other hooks into thinkpad ACPI uses about 5megs RSS. IIRC my friend uses fvwm with more involved configuration (taskbar and QNX-style sidebar, the whole thing looks like QNX's Photon) that probably uses even less memory (ie. less running fvwm modules).

I loved fvwm. A pain to configure, but you could make it do pretty much anything. I had integrated xmobar with mine and essentially copied over the keybindings from xmonad. Not pretty or user friendly but it worked for me for a long time. Now I'm using KDE, not because it's better especially but because it got me to stop tinkering with my window manager. :)

You have to admit it's pretty cool what you can do though. I had a dynamic menu generated off the current slashdot headlines too.

i used it for a bit back in the 90s. i used to tell people it stood for "fucking versatile window manager" - if you were willing to spend time on it, you could really configure it.

Maybe these need to be updated?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_d...

It's great to have some numbers behind all these options.

As someone who switched to xfce around the time of Unity, but runs on a desktop with 16 GB of RAM, this article tells me that the differences here are not worth considering as a reason to pick one WM over another. But then again I'm using the heaviest option. :-)

I switched to Xfwm when Metacity started killing console beeps[0], then full[1] Xfce when Gnome 3 came around. As such, I can assure you that even with a mere 8 GB of RAM, there isn’t much of a difference – apart from functionality, that is.

[0] If you had a terminal window open, "echo \a\a\a\a" would not play anything if Metacity was running.

[1] Nautilus 2.32 is still sticking around because I rather dislike Xfce’s drawing of the desktop.

Slightly OT, but I think developers often over-optimize our technology choices. That is, we spend more time choosing between two options than it's really worth, because neither choice is bad. Nothing wrong with doing due diligence, but at some point it's fair to say "either option is okay" or "non-technical considerations are more important". I suspect this phenomenon shares something in common with language wars like Python vs. Ruby.

Openbox isn't really a Blackbox fork. Early versions were derived from the project, but there's been a rewrite since then. At this time it shares nothing with Blackbox other than visual appearance.

Odd that this article neglects to mention that LXDE's WM is OpenBox.

dwm is configured by changing a .h file during compile time. now wonder it's so light :)

Awesome. As a fluxbox user since ~2003, it's nice to see the little guys get some HN love.

Fluxbox does everything I need, and quite a few things I don't, or need only rarely.

I'm in the same boat.

To date, I have not found a solution that works better than fluxbox + emacs + urxvt.

monsterwm is even smaller than dwm, with 700k of memory (grep Rss /proc/`pidof monsterwm`/smaps | awk '{t=t+$2}END{print t}')

Every time I find myself in X11-Windows, I use twm. It's there, it's small, it doesn't promise more than it can deliver.

   sudo apt-get install @lxde-desktop

Is the @ a typo? I have never seen an apt-get incantation like that.

It doesnt work in debian. So who knows...

  # apt-get install @lxde-desktop
  Reading package lists... Done
  Building dependency tree
  Reading state information... Done
  E: Unable to locate package @lxde-desktop

No, I think it is a group shortcut. As in install all packages in the group lxde-desktop.

Do you mean task? As in a synonym for

  apt-get install task-lxde-desktop

been using xfce4 for years, started because my machine was too slow, now i use it for every single machine.

somehow, it doesnt feel as fast as it used to be.

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